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Folsom Street Now Has Bike Lanes!

It's been a year since the city discussed putting bike lanes allll the way down Folsom Street, and after a year of anticipation, the city has finally gotten around to painting those lanes. So now—praise be to Allah—we can ride our bikes straight from Homestead to the Embarcadero unencumbered by turns.

The problem with parking separated bike lanes is that you have to remove parking in advance of any curb cut so that there is adequate sight distance to see cyclists for turning cars. There are so many curb cuts in SF that parking separated bike lanes would in effect remove most of the parking on the street. If the parking is removed, there is no parking buffer.

I used to go out of my way to ride on Folsom because it DIDN’T have bike lanes – you could take up the whole right lane, drivers were surprisingly cool with it, and I felt very safe. This was to escape Valencia, which is a shitshow with all the double parking, right turning cars, and erratic pulling in and out of parking spots with no blinkers. And drivers get ANGRY when bikes are in THEIR lane when there is a BIKE lane, regardless of whether it is completely unusable. So now this on Folsom.

Let’s be done with pretending that bike lanes are the epitome of bike-friendliness and start painting sharrows in the middle of lanes and get the police to actually enforce traffic laws (speed, reckless driving, etc). As P.D. Bird said, separate but equal is ridiculous and just legitimizes what impatient drivers want: for bikes to get the hell out of their way so they don’t have to share the road.